priest & writer

A Church
where the most important decisions are made
almost exclusively by a celibate male clergy,
and where bishops are held to little or no accountability,
is unsustainable
in a world where patriarchal and monarchical societies
-begrudgingly, but steadily-
are ceding rights and duties to those
who are not part of the nobility, the clergy,
or one specific gender.

It’s not about the end of the Catholic Church,
but about the crumbling of the present governing and organizational structure that mirrors the Roman Empire
more than it reflects today’s reality or
ecclesial life that is found in the New Testament
or was experienced in the first couple of centuries of the Christian Church.

Ironically, the priests and bishops that oppose the Jesuit pope’s call
for pastoral change and conversion
believe they are the bulwark of the Church’s stability.

They believe that they,
and they alone,
can stop the pieces and chunks of this anachronistic structure
from caving in
simply by a strict and rigid adherence
to moralizing norms and liturgical rubrics,
an obsession to control and rule Christ’s faithful
and an insistence that only the ordained
can decide the ordering of ecclesial life.

They are hastening the implosion.
And, in a paradoxical way,
they may be helping Pope Francis
more than one can even imagine.